Mark Grueber’s first day at Ford was June 12, 1996. “This is a fun story,” he says, an illuminated first-generation Bronco grille hanging on the wall behind him in his home office. That’s the day Ford built the last fifth-generation Bronco, ending a production run that began in 1966 and launching what became known as the Bronco Underground, a group of people within Ford dedicated to the return of the off-road SUV.
This year, they got their wish. The Bronco is back, and Grueber, now Ford’s marketing manager, is tasked with the brand’s present and future. Of course, he’s hardly alone in his excitement, and Ford isn’t the only automaker leaning hard on its past, though it’s maybe leaning the hardest. Aside from the Bronco, Ford is leveraging two more classic names, the Lightning and the Maverick, but applying them in new ways. And then it took its most iconic badge, Mustang, and put it on an electric crossover.
General Motors is prepping the return of the environmentally maligned Hummer, but now it’s a 9000-pound electric pickup and SUV. Acura is relaunching the Integra, which has been gone for more than two decades. Jeep revived the Wagoneer nameplate this year and put it on a luxury SUV built to park comfortably next to all the McMansions. And if you’re still wondering why manufacturers took this dive into the archives, you probably already know. It’s about money.
“A company that’s sitting on an asset like Grand Wagoneer, why wouldn’t it use it?” says Elea McDonnell Feit, a professor of marketing at Drexel University and former market researcher in GM’s advanced vehicle development center. Decades of communication and success (or failure) have made these names mean something to people. There is power in meaning, and profit in power—even if the strategies with the nameplates differ.
At Ford, dealers are dedicating separate showrooms to the Bronco and the smaller Bronco Sport crossover. Owners can visit one of four Bronco Off-Rodeo schools while dressed in Bronco merchandise—or wait and pick up the merch on site. “Wagoneer is definitely the premium extension of Jeep,” Jeep CEO Christian Meunier told The Verge’s Decoder podcast in October. But there’s no Jeep badge anywhere on the new full-size SUVs. And while Hummer was its own brand under General Motors prior to its demise in 2010, it’s now falling under the GMC umbrella.
General Motors questioned bringing back the Hummer name because of its history, says Phil Brook, GMC’s vice president of marketing. Unlike Ford with the Bronco or Jeep and the Wagoneer, GM is trying to change people’s perceptions associated with a name, and those perceptions are part of why it failed the first time. The company attempted to sell Hummer to a Chinese manufacturer in 2010 but when that deal failed, GM shut down the brand because the trucks were gas guzzlers.
“The look on people’s faces when we’ve said that Hummer is coming back—they’ve gone ‘really?’ As soon as you say electric, everything that was in any way a concern or negative just completely evaporates,” Brook says. But GM will have to reiterate that. “They can say Hummer, and it instantly means excess,” McDonnell Feit says. “They also have to communicate the second part of the new message.”
NBA superstar LeBron James, who owned a Hummer H2 in his early years in the league, stars in the new Hummer’s commercials, and the brand calls it the first all-electric supertruck. In the TV spot, it’s storming, lightning strikes, and the slogan “A quiet revolution is coming” pops up on the screen to point out the truck’s electric powertrain. However, “car companies are notoriously bad at assuming that people understand,” McDonnell Feit says.
GMC
Americans are spending at higher price points, too, and Jeep is aware. Its roots are in military-inspired off-roaders, but the brand’s bestselling model last year was the Grand Cherokee, which ranges in price from $35,105 to nearly $100,000 for the 707-hp Trackhawk model. The Grand Wagoneer is the company’s new flagship, and it can reach prices over $110,000 fully equipped. GMC is homing in on this, too, and that’s why it put Hummer under its brand, rather than on its own like before. Brook says that GMC’s highly equipped Denali models account for nearly half of its sales.
They’re not just spending more. Americans have a newfound desire for adventure and getting outside, heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ford sees this and is entering the rugged off-road SUV space, dominated by the Jeep Wrangler for years, with the new Bronco. And it nailed the Bronco’s retro-inspired looks with near perfection—particularly the grilles, which are reminiscent of the one hanging on Grueber’s wall.
Prior to the Bronco’s debut last summer, the Bronco Underground made three big attempts to bring it back. The first was when Ford built prototypes in 1999, but then the automaker was hit with the recall of over 14 million Firestone tires, mostly on its Explorer. Four years later, an awkward-looking silver Bronco concept was revealed, but it wasn’t considered production ready. Then Ford tried to build a Bronco on an actual platform, but the market was shifting to larger four-door utility vehicles, not two-door rugged SUVs. In 2013, Ford risked losing the Bronco trademark, so it issued a one-off Expedition and put the Bronco name on it.
Michael SimariCar and Driver
The breakthrough was when the market shifted from sedans, Grueber says. Ford dropped them from its lineup in 2018, which freed up space at Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant when the Focus was nixed. “We activated the underground and started to put together the plan to bring it back,” he says. Now Ford hopes its new Maverick compact pickup will attract those former sedan buyers.
These names evoke nostalgia in consumers, reminders of the way things used to be. Especially with millennials, McDonnell Feit points out. “The automotive companies are trying to leverage millennials’ fascination with all things old-fashioned,” she says. This demographic is listening to vinyl records again; binge-watching Stranger Things, the Netflix science-fiction series set in the 1980s; and, the Detroit automakers hope, buying Broncos, Hummers, and Wagoneers.
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